Disenchanted with the role and his salary, Sean Connery stepped away from Bond in 1967 following the bombastic You Only Live Twice. This presented makers Eon with their first real challenge as they had to find a replacement which eventually came in the shape of George Lazenby and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service followed.
However, Lazenby’s sage like agent Ronan O’Rahilly, made the unusual and arguably catastrophic step of advising his client to leave the role after just one movie. Rumours that O’Rahilly confidently predicted that the internet would never take off and declined to represent The Beatles have never been confirmed.
Nonetheless, cue a whole host of award-winning blockbuster roles in the early 1970’s for Lazenby.
Or maybe not.
So, before Lazenby’s sole Bond film was even released, Albert Broccoli was tasked with finding yet another actor for the role of Bond. That search didn’t seem to last long as the studio stepped in and insisted that Connery should be bagged for serious money.
Not only would Connery return but Diamonds Are Forever became an exercise in playing it safe. Shirley Bassey was back with the title song after Goldfinger while the director of that movie, Guy Hamilton, was in the director’s chair again. Indeed, the producers clearly wanted to return to former glories as the plot is a McGuffin / commodity based one like Goldfinger. In fact, early plans for Diamonds Are Forever were to have Gert Frobe return as Auric Goldfinger’s twin brother. I’m not kidding.
By this point in the film franchise, the Ian Fleming source texts were not always being rigidly adhered to. While On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had been a fairly faithful rendition of the novel, You Only Live Twice on celluloid was barely recognisable from the book. Diamonds Are Forever heralded the start of an era in the series where the films would merely be inspired by the books with a few specific elements being translated like the diamond smuggling here along with some characters.
What the film lifts from the book is the casinos, the diamond smuggling, Tiffany Case, the henchmen and well…that’s about it. It is mere lip service to the novel. Maybe that was for the best as the book was the fourth from Fleming and when he was struggling to be consistently compelling with his tales about 007. It measured up unfavourably to both Moonraker and From Russia With Love – the third and fifth books respectively.
Anyway, Connery returns in the pre-credit title sequence with director Hamilton trying to keep a little mystery about who the “new” Bond is. Guess what? It’s that bloke with the barely concealed Scottish accent and a toupee. It doesn’t take long to realise Connery is back as the main man, albeit a rather heftier and aged one.
Opinions about Diamonds Are Forever, for this correspondent anyway, have fluctuated over the decades, probably based on age. As a child, it was a firm favourite; the campy and outlandish tone chiming with this viewer. Yet, with age, one might still find the chintzy feel to the movie occasionally charming but one struggles to overlook the inexplicable aspects of the plot and characterisation.
Firstly, there is Bond himself. The opening sequences portray Bond as a man hell bent on revenge regarding Blofeld. This is tangible as a direct follow on from the tragic events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Once revenge has supposedly been taken, we get the title credits and then head into a plot that begins very similarly to Goldfinger. Bond investigates a diamond smuggling ring and goes to Amsterdam where he impersonates a diamond smuggler in a chain that starts in South Africa and ends in the United States. Quite why a relatively mundane issue like this has the Double-0 sections top man on the job is puzzling given his activities in the last few films (averting global warfare and pestilence) a fact that is hammered home when diamond smuggler Tiffany Case remarks “you just killed James Bond”.
In Connery’s brief spell away, the character appears to have gone from being a sleek undercover agent to a household name action hero superman. If you like your Bond films full of intrigue with a sliver of subtlety, this might not be the one for you.
But he is not the only one who has undergone a major change. Returning villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is back and bears zero resemblance to his previous incarnations played by Donald Pleasance and Telly Savalas. This one, Charles Gray, is the antithesis of the others. Dispensing with any generic pan-European accent and going full Eton, he minces about the place with a permanently disdainfully raised eyebrow while stroking his pussy. He isn’t a patch on the previous versions and that includes the one obscured by a screen in Thunderball.
Director Guy Hamilton manages to distract his audience with a whole array of tricks, red herrings, ensemble characters and gimmicks. Distracting them from the fact that the plot doesn’t stack up in any way, shape or form. Because Bond embarks on following the diamond smuggling chain (for opaque reasons) and along the way we discover the protagonists in it are all being bumped off by homosexual couple Wint and Kidd. At this point in the film and by the time Bond, impersonating smuggler Peter Franks, has travelled to Las Vegas with Case, things sort of make sense. That doesn’t last long as it soon becomes apparent that the diamonds are being stockpiled but taken away from the Mob orchestrators of the scheme. So why is the mystery villain or organization bumping off the smugglers thus ensuring the diamonds will eventually stop coming across? Wint and Kidd are essentially superfluous.
But Hamilton throws in plenty of bells and whistles including a circus and car stunts to deflect from this faux pas. Bond then randomly decides to visit the penthouse of mysterious millionaire recluse Willard White and it is revealed that Blofeld is not only alive and well but posing as him and has hijacked his empire. How convenient.
It turns out that Blofeld has created clones of himself – which we knew in the pre-credit titles sequence and should have had 007 suspicious and keen to investigate more – and has some dastardly scheme up his sleeve. Naturally he cocks up assassinating Bond so that our hero can raise the alarm. Now the film goes into overdrive having led the viewer a merry and mystifying dance for an hour or so. Blofeld has used the stockpiled diamonds to power a global laser targeting atomic military bases. Now this writer is no scientist but this seems far fetched and, may one point out, the premise the precious stones were being taken out of circulation when it would’ve suited Blofeld’s scheme to have an abundance of them is puzzling.
But don’t worry, Blofeld has decamped to an oil rig where he is holding the world to ransom while being a total bastard towards his latest mad scientist facilitating the whole diamond/laser thing.
For some bizarre reason, Bond arrives in a weather balloon as supposedly the first response from the international community. Bomb the heck out of the rig and wipe out Blofeld? Or send in some bloke in a tux? Bond arrives, wanders casually around the place before raising the alarm and the authorities lay siege. Blofeld attempts to escape (we’re never very sure if this is successful or not) while global peace is preserved and Bond is the hero.
Is Diamonds Are Forever a good Bond movie? No. Is it a bad one? Almost definitely. Is it a weird aberration in the series? Oh yes!
Connery demonstrates why it was time for him to move on in 1967. His performance is casual and smooth but he is a bloated and sardonic version of the portrayal he gave in his younger years. He comes across as a cabaret performer on his farewell tour in Vegas. But that is a mere side issue.
The makers, by way of sending the audience down plenty of rabbit holes, having Blofeld disguised in a dress and including a vast ensemble of peculiar and often superfluous characters, seemingly attempt to distract us from the quite ridiculous and heavily contrived plot. On initially watching Diamonds Are Forever, perhaps that works but closer scrutiny shows how poor a job the writers and producers did.
That the series would continue as it has when you consider this was made in 1971, is a surprise. Connery departed again, a new Bond was brought in and the franchise dusted itself down and carried on. The film is undoubtedly a case study in how movie scripts and plots need a fine polish much like those diamonds themselves.
Athon 